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Act BIG!

“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” Thomas Jefferson

A while back I wrote a post about thinking BIG. I believe that when we’re on a growth journey we must think BIG before we can act BIG. Yet once we begin to think BIG – we must ACT.

Acting BIG is not fake or phony. It’s not ego driven. It’s about taking consistent action toward the BIG dreams we have in our life. In order to live the life I imagined as a little girl I had to first think I could and then I had to take action. Acting BIG or doing BIG things isn’t easy – in fact it’s down right scary. Yet it has huge rewards.

Before I can step out and take action it’s important to know who I am. Knowing who I am narrows my focus. One of the worst things I can do when taking action towards my dreams is to try to be everything to everyone. When I first started speaking. I marketed myself to ALL organizations. I claimed to be able to speak to any group on a variety of soft skills topics. I took a lots of action and tried to sell myself to numerous groups – but had no success. I was taking action but not focused action. I was busy but not busy doing things that would bring in revenue. As I began getting clear about who I was and what I was really good at, I was able to take action that resulted in revenue and growth.

In addition to knowing who I was, I had to get clear about what I really wanted. In the beginning I didn’t want to charge for speaking, or at least not very much. I didn’t want to talk about the money part or focus on the business side – I just wanted to speak. I often told people I loved it so much that I would do it for free. I cast a wide net that resulted in lots of free speaking gigs. I knew I couldn’t keep speaking for free – if I was going to keep doing it I had to make some money. And that meant I had to get clear about what I really wanted for my business. Making no money motivated me to began the process of creating a plan for my business. I wrote a bucket list, set some BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOALS and created a one year business strategy. And I hired a coach to hold me accountable.

One thing my business coach challenged me to do was to take action EVERY day. She had me focus on activites that would generate revenue and/or move my business forward. I didn’t really like the things she had me do. I had to make cold calls, attend networking events and ask for business. I would have rather been working on my website, writing new programs and organizing my office. The problem was those things did nothing to move my business forward. I had to take the right action.